Noir Carnival edited by K.A. Laity

This anthology is a follow-up to Fox Spirit’s Weird Noir. I love the cover of this book. It is a perfect design for a t-shirt or a poster as well. It isn’t easy to make a clown seem more creepy but this cover manages to do that and yet somehow manage not to seem too serious.

It would be easy to call this an eclectic mix of the weird and the outright bizarre but there is is more to this book than that. Carnivals are always a great inspiration for things that are a little odd. In this book that oddness has been twisted and darkened and yet somehow manages to inject some humour (albeit gallows humour).

Family Blessings by Jan Kozlowski is a great start to this book. It really does set the tone and get you in the mood to read more. It took me about five pages to work out that I was going to enjoy the whole of this book. There are plenty of stories to enjoy. Chloë Yates gives us a story that makes dolls seem even more creepy than the Chuckie movies which feels totally different than the totally bizarre trapped in a box story presented by Joan De La Haye. My favourite story in this anthology is She’s My Witch by Paul D. Brazill. I am a fan of Paul’s work and this short story works perfectly. It is probably the most crime noir of all the stories but it is definitely on the weird side of the tracks. The last line of the story ties it together perfectly and three days later is still clarion clear in my mind.

Probably the best thing about this book for me was that there were a lot of stories by authors that I had never heard of that provided me with plenty of entertainment. I plan to look some of them up later for some more reading. To make that easier The Skulk have provided a biography and links to author sites at the end of this book. I enjoyed this book immensely and think it is probably the best Fox Spirit book so far.